Arts Festival at the Three County Fairground
The Three County Fairground in Northampton, just east of the Berkshires, has been showing dairy cows and particolored chickens for 200 years, but on two weekends a year it turns on like a lighted stage for artists from around New England, and some from around the country.
Linda and Geoff Post founded the Paradise City Arts Festival 25 years ago. She is an painter, and he is a fiber artist and designer. they left the round of national shows and Fashion Week to create their own center of art in Western Massachusetts, and 10,000 to 15,000 people now come on a weekend to see it. (Northampton holds the festival twice a year, in October and in May.)
You can wander through an outdoor sculpture garden here, or talk with a fiber artist who paints vivid landscapes in thread. Glassblowers may show the crowd how to make a stem for the globe of a glass pumpkin. The hot glass pulls like taffy into a curl of vine. In the tent behind them, a local singer-songwriter is strumming by a booth of locally roasted coffee from a downtown café.
In the long wooden exhibit halls, artists have set up booths for ceramics and paintings. A blacksmith shows hand-forged knives, and a clock as broad as a balcony keeps time with sleek, exposed wooden gears.
The Paradise City Arts Festival's outdoor Sculpture Garden changes each season.
Vicente Garcia demonstrates on the potter's wheel at Paradise City Arts Festival.
Philip Roberts, an artist at Paradise City Arts Festival, creates complex wall pieces made of multiple layers of cut wood, made from various plywoods with subtle differences in the grain. He stains the layers in different colors to bring out the design's depth.
Catherine Cantara is a ceramist who makes functional stoneware, raku-fired and pit-fired (smoke) pottery. She says, "My work is influenced by the beautiful landscape that surrounds my studio. The rugged seacoast, the woods behind my house, the sky and earth all play a part in the shapes and colors I use in my pieces.” She incorporates horsehair and metallic lustre glazes into many of her very distinctive raku-fired pieces. Crow Bowl is raku-fired pottery with horsehair. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival
Vicente Garcia demonstrates on the potter's wheel at Paradise City Arts Festival. A ceramist and college professor, Garcia is also a sculptor of large-scale metal structures. He will share the secrets of his studio every day at the Festival. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
Dwight Baird lives on the border between Canada and New York State, but his heart resides in the tropics. Baird’s current series of paintings shows the people of Cuba. These sun-drenched works move through the backstreets of Havana, with old men playing dominos and rolling cigars, women swaying to a Latin beat in mysterious doorways and vintage cars rolling slowly down the road. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
Maine painter Lori Austill's exuberant encaustics, with their depth and rich surfaces, celebrate color, texture, movement, and life. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
All manner of wild things, from bronze herons and glass-eyed dragonflies to towering giraffes, line new Sculpture Promenade — giant clay pots, stone fountains, outdoor seating, birdbaths. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
Take warriors from ancient Greece, put them in an epic battle with medieval knights, add the imagination of metal sculptor Matthew Evald Johnson, and the result is Chess mastery. Photo courtesy of Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton
